LOLwork premieres, but is television ready for Internet cats?

If you’re spend hours on the Internet like we do, you’ve already come to know of LOLcats as the World Wide Web’s candy land. A twisted, kitten-infested, rainbow-spewing kind of land that forces you to adore animals and help them express themselves with slabs of broken English captions. As if it wasn’t already a guilty pleasure online, I Can Has Cheezburger, the media group behind LOLcats’ success, has now forayed into the television realm with the premiere of Bravo’s LOLwork.

The format of Seattled-based LOLwork is similar – if not identical – to NBC’s The Office. The show coldly opens to the Cheezburger crew tackling the day’s work: Sifting through animal videos, rationalizing what’s funny from depressing, discussing fan requests for more variation of cat breeds, and deciphering the overall viral LOLcat formula. There’s a lack of silly background music that’s standard in most Bravo shows, and the confessionals take place right in front of random office wall instead of the character’s home or a green screen. At some point, it’s almost uncomfortable how quiet the conversations between characters are. But then you realize that the underproduced quality is an oddly realistic depiction of a work environment … until the characters speak.

Let me be clear: The show has funny moments, so awkwardly funny that I found myself covering my face and sinking into my couch in disbelief that the coworker’s exchanges just happened on my TV. Whether or not the jokes and personalities are authentic is another issue. From the one-liners (“People tell me my cat is like a dog and I tell them to shut up,” “I’m fluent in cat lady”) to the deadpan delivery of buzzkill insults hurled across the newsroom, it’s hard to believe this ridiculousness exist in real life. But then again, the LOLcats world is unlike any other, and we couldn’t imagine any other kind of people running a site like I Can Has Cheezburger without converting to Internet speak along the way.

LOLwork is the second tech-related show Bravo premiered this week (in addition to Start-Ups: Silicon Valley) but it’s definitely worth a watch if you enjoy the quirkiness of our Internet realm. At the core, it’s Web culture come to life; a collection of everything that’s funny about the Internet in one eccentric office. It doesn’t have the greatest time slot at 11 p.m. eastern time following Top Chef: Seattle, but if you as a Bravo audience can stomach some LOLs after gourmet mozzarella watermelon salad, consider giving LOLwork a shot. At the very least, the show transitions between events with LOLcats and YouTube videos so you’ll be the least bit entertained.